India a land of software developers: Microsoft official

It is estimated that there are around four to five million developers in India and it ranks third after China and the United States.PTI | May 13, 2017, 08:42 IST

India has become a land of software developers with the country accounting for the third largest number of such professionals, a senior Microsoft official has said.

Driven by immense opportunities that the Indian government's digitisation programme has offered and the fact that it opens up a new vista of more than a billion plus market inside the country, there is a new level of enthusiasm and confidence among the Indian developers community, said Narendra Bhandari, GM Developer Group in India, Microsoft.

"The impact of these policy initiatives like demonetisation and GST, which is being rolled out soon, on software developers is that people who are building these applications are now thinking, how do I build these applications for a billion people, not for the twenty million people living in Bangalore and Mumbai and Delhi," Bhandari told PTI in an interview.

The huge size of the market itself and the potential of reaching out to every nook and corner of the world is a big motivating factor the developers in India, who are now coming out with "amazing" software and mobile apps.

It is estimated that there are around four to five million developers in India and it ranks third after China and the United States, he said, adding that developers in India have moved from just code-writing to product development.

"Over last two to three years .. a lot of the developers now are not just building applications but they're building experiences, they're building retail capabilities, they're building supply chain infrastructure, they're building business applications. That has changed the landscape quite a bit," he said.

The ecosystem in India has changed where it's not just "I want to work on a large project and every three months or six months I'll have a release, now you're working on a project and you come up with capabilities every few weeks," Bhandari said.

He said although a "sense of urgency" has crept up, there is also the sense that the number of opportunities opening up is phenomenal.

Citing the example of Freshdesk, a cloud-based customer support platform, Bhandari said its software was now sold in over a hundred countries.

"Its CEO Girish (Mathrubootham) has not visited 100 countries. He was saying my software is sold in over a hundred countries. He's not visited a hundred countries, he doesn't have people in a hundred countries," he said.

"This is a business application...There are many such examples of companies from India selling into hundreds of countries across the globe. That's an opportunity which has been created, I would say, in the last couple of years.

That's a capability which has now been created in the last few years, and you're able to reach out to people with very minimal efforts," Bhandari said, arguing that as such India is now becoming land of opportunities for developers.

"Opportunities are opening up more and more for them (developers) to be able to reach the globe and also to serve India in a much more significant way. The Indian opportunity has grown significantly. The global opportunity is now available easily, are available for them to tap easily. The Indian opportunity has just exploded in size, and growing," he asserted.

Bhandari said the Indian government had done quite a lot, but more steps need to be taken to further facilitate the developer's community.

"A lot has been done but there's still further a few steps for the small companies, the software companies, to be able to tap into the opportunity," he said.